A North Carolina restaurant that joined in with other restaurants large and small around the US in asking that customers not bring guns inside was robbed at gunpoint, a seemingly random crime that has further galvanized gun control opponents.

Police in Durham are searching for three men who donned masks and
entered The Pit Authentic Barbecue through the building’s back
door near closing time on Sunday. Employees were forced to lie on
the floor and two were assaulted although not seriously hurt. How
much money the robbers got away with was not immediately clear,
although all of the employees and customers still dining at the
time are unharmed, according to local outlets.

What has turned the incident from a local crime story into one
worthy of headlines from outside North Carolina is that the
restaurant’s proprietor, Greg Hatem, had previously hung a sign
on the door asking that customers follow a “no weapons”
and “no concealed firearms” policy.

The position, while not explicitly political, aligns The Pit with
major chains like Chipotle, which asked customers not to bring
guns into its stores after gun control opponents flaunted
military-style assault rifles while ordering a burrito, and
Starbucks, which temporarily closed a location in Newtown,
Connecticut because of a planned pro-gun demonstration near the
site of the Newtown Elementary School shooting.

Chipotle explained its decision in a statement Monday, announcing
that “the display of firearms in our restaurants has now created
an environment that is potentially intimidating or uncomfortable
for many of our customers.”

Those announcements, along with there being a growing number of Americans who support tighter
firearm regulation, has put conservative lawmakers and
right-wing bloggers on the defensive. In posts chronicling the
North Carolina restaurant robbery, multiple blogs equated the
sign with the National Rifle Association rationale that the more
people who are carrying guns, the safer the situation.

“I am very glad that no one was seriously injured. But
everyone involved needs to face one important fact: they were not
murdered only because the robbers did not decide to kill
them,” wrote the NC Gun Blog. “Why? Because the owner of
The Pit authentic Barbecue has banned guns in his restaurant…He
went out of his way to make custom signs to make sure we gun
owners felt unwelcome.”

Another blog, titled Guns N’ Freedom, equated the situation with
the same laws that supposedly made the thousands of fatal
shootings possible over recent years.

“This should be a clear reminder that criminals don’t obey
gun laws and they don’t obey signs on windows that say they can’t
bring their guns inside,” the blogger soapboxed. “These
signs only stop law abiding citizens from being able to protect
themselves and make the establishment a bigger target for crooks.
After all, why pick a target where people can shoot back at
you?”

Such assumptions have no founding in reality, according to a
number of research studies published over the past few years by
multiple, unrelated academics. Boston University Professor
Michael Siegel, along with two co-authors, revealed the result of
a twenty year study which found that firearm
ownership does not deter violence.

“We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of
gun ownership and higher firearms homicide rates,” the
authors wrote. “Although we could not determine causation, we
found that states with higher rates of gun ownership has
disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related
homicides.”